# The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

> Source: <https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/4/astra-pelicans/>
> Published: 2026-09-04 23:59:05+00:00

I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate [SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles](https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/) - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in [a comparison grid](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-6-and-5.6-pelicans.html) with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, and beyond being fun the result was surprisingly useful.

See [the grid](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-6-and-5.6-pelicans.html) for full quality images. Here's [the transcript](https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2Ff789d2784fc6c5b870cc80f0b7cd9d01) that created the GPT-6 Nova pelicans.

There are a few interesting things that stand out from this grid.

- The Astra pelicans are *much better* . The very best GPT-5.6-Sol pelican (I liked xhigh better than max) is still pretty clearly a bunch of abstract shapes. Every single one of the Astra pelicans, from low to xhigh, looks better than that. The Astra max one is really good.
- Astra below max still doesn't reliably get the pelican legs on both sides of the frame.
- In terms of cost, Astra may be around twice the price of Sol ($10/million input, $50/million output, compared to $5/$30 for Sol), but it uses significantly less tokens at each of the levels, making the prices at the different levels closer than they might otherwise be.
- Astra low produces a better pelican than ANY of the GPT-5.6 Sol models at any level, for 9.55 cents. Spending 10 cents on any other model gets a much worse result.
- Look at the input token counts: Astra and Luna both used 16 input tokens, Sol and Terra used 26. That's interesting.

I wonder if Astra and Luna are more related to each other than OpenAI let on?

Tags: [ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai), [openai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/openai), [generative-ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai), [llms](https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms), [pelican-riding-a-bicycle](https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle), [gpt-6-astra](https://simonwillison.net/tags/gpt-6-astra)